Challenges in HE

I was alerted to this by the effervescent Grainne Conole. Panos Vlachopoulos has asked these two questions:
1. What would you consider the top 3 challenges that the Higher Education sector faces in your country?
2. Do you see any value of the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement in trying to address any of the challenges?
He has posted a collection of answers on his blog.

My answers are as follows:
1. What would you consider the top 3 challenges that the Higher Education sector faces in your country?
The first challenge is that we are stuck with a certain kind of student arriving. I have no problem with them as people and their experiences so far. Similarly, I have no problem with the schools and teachers that turn them out at the age of 18. There is however something deeply wrong with the UK's educational policy, and has been for several decades. I have blogged about that in more detail here. In a nutshell students arrive having been taught entirely in a system which encourages only individual competitiveness and being told how to achieve grades. When they arrive with us, many of them don't have a clue how to take charge of their learning, or how to learn in a collaborative way. If we let them go on like that, they will emerge as stunted learners, not having achieved anything like their potential. So we need to put massive effort in during their first year to turn them into people who can take charge, and who understand and experience the value of working together with other students.

The second challenge is our obsession with technology. Many people will read that sentence and say either “Hooray, a man who likes pencils”, or “Oh dear, a man who likes pencils”. That's not my point at all. For the record I like what we call technology*, I work with it all the time. As my bio says, I live in my airing cupboard because that is where the computer is. But we tend to focus far too much on the technology and not enough on the teaching and learning that is going on regardless of the environment. As an example, I have done a bit of digging around on blended learning lately. Most of the discussions I have read base themselves on what forms of technology are being used, and are thus forced into the mould of whatever the technology is. We should start with the learning – blended learning is a combination of individual and collaborative learning. Once we have that firmly fixed as our base, we can consider how those forms of learning can be worked out with whatever student and teacher presence is available. I think we would get further than we do at the moment.

The third challenge is something specific to the UK, though it appears in other forms in other places. That is our class ridden obsession with the difference between “academic” and “vocational” learning. I've blogged about that before too. We have come a long way in this country since the beginning of the Thatcher era which finally prised loose the grip of deference from our economy. It hasn't worked so well on our society or on our politics unfortunately, and there is still a specific form which views anything manual as of secondary status compared to proper academic education. It is still evident in the solid support for bringing back grammar schools. (Nobody ever talks about bringing back secondary moderns, which are the inevitable twin of grammar schools, necessary resting places for the majority who fail the exams to get in to grammars.) It is not something that the HE sector on its own can do anything about – it is a society wide problem, but it is one which deeply affects the whole disciplinary structure, award structure and ethos of our profession.

2. Do you see any value of the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement in trying to address any of the challenges?
I cannot foresee what effect the OER movement is going to have. Other people seem to have a clearer vision, but I think predicting the future for OERs is fraught with imponderables. They are going to do things that we cannot possibly predict. Trying to target them would be like trying to target an atom bomb. To change metaphors rapidly midstream, suddenly a tiger has emerged. The best thing we can do is grab hold of the tail and hold on for the ride. Having said that, here are some things that I hope will happen.

It is a lot easier now for any teacher to produce learning material that is of high quality both intellectually and aesthetically. I have just learned how to make an e-book. Now that I know how to do it, I can produce one in five minutes – given that I have written the material – and have it loaded on my students' devices in ten. That has got to change the balance of power between the providers of content (the teachers) and the providers of distribution (the publishing houses etc). Not least, I suspect that there might eventually be a complete meltdown of the entire internal United States school textbook system, which will be watched with a certain amount of schadenfreude in many quarters.

But opening up competition doesn't deal with established interests. People who have power will hold on to it as long as possible. And nowadays knowledge is power. I don't expect to see the world opening up generally without a long and bitter fight. As an example I have an interest in the PACE trial, an investigation into the efficacy of treatments for people with ME. Published results suggest that CBT and Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) are the most efficacious treatments. They are, however, subject to controversy: considerable suspicion has been cast on the trial protocols and on the way the results were arrived at. The controversy could be resolved with publication of the raw data, which the authors are simply refusing to do. They have no interest in openness: they have an interest in keeping the results closed. Such interests will continue to work against openness in educational resources.

I work a little bit with people in Africa, primarily in the field of healthcare technology management (HTM). I (try to) produce learning materials which will enable technicians and engineers in low resource settings to become good managers. When we provide consultancy to hospitals and districts, the headline is about healthcare technology but the skills we pass on are the skills of generic management. A few years ago we wrote a policy manual. We did not realise at the time, but we were producing an OER, and one which is being used all over the world to help inform policy and train staff. We intend to build on this with more, and more specifically targeted, educational materials, which will perforce be OERs. For the organisation I work for, the advent of OERs is helping us to realise that the value in what we do is not in the content so much as in the process. I think that realisation is slowly percolating through many academic institutions, and I hope that it will eventually help us to move away from our reliance on assessment of product as the sole arbiter of the quality of a degree. This goes back to my first point about what students need to learn. They need to learn how to work collaboratively. Module teams in my institution recognise that this is important and work in various collaborative exercises, but many still provide marks only for written assignments. They need to twig that they should be marking process as well as product in order to make sure the students get the best out of it. An excellent example emerged the other day in some work on radiologists, and how they spot areas of concern. It built on the moonwalking gorilla video, which is still one of my all time favourites. I read a report on the BBC website: Why do radiologists miss dancing gorillas? The most important section was a side insert quoting from a senior radiologist Dr Antoni Toms “"How do you know when a radiologist has been trained? They sit an exam. But you could argue what you should do is get them to sit in front of an eye-tracking machine and if they have got a consultant pattern of movements they have seen enough cases. That's the future, but we're a long way off." Classic. It is a stretch from OERs to assessment methods, but the connection is there.

In short, my three problems were: students' ability to learn collaboratively, our obsession with technology and our snobbishness about vocational qualifications. I don't think we will overcome these with OERs, but OERs are going to blow a lot of things up, and they will undoubtedly be part of the process.

*People keep telling me they "don't like technology". My reply is always "A pencil *is* technology".

What people read

I have two blogs.

On Really Useful Knowledge I blog about educational things – pedagogy, philosophy of teaching and learning, stuff like that. On this blog one post is the runaway winner in terms of all time views. It could be about why we learn the humanities, the politics of education, the connections between history and geography, the place of elearning, the difference between deep and surface learning, media power, different tutorial techniques and their effects. It could be about any of these things, but it is not. It's about sodding word count.

On A Comfortable Place I blog about politics, disability, religion, civil liberties, driving, film, the NHS, Tottenham Hotspur and a whole variety of other things. I've done several posts lately on how Iain Duncan Smith's poisonous policies are hurting the most vulnerable people in our society. I am liberal, politically committed, religious, thoughtful, and I like to think my blog reflects this. So which is the most read post of all time on this blog? Well, for a while, it was “Spartacus – what next?” about how to handle the afore mentioned hypocrite and his policies. I was quite pleased about that – not about the policies, which I am very sad that my party supports, but about having made some sort of meaningful contribution to the debate. But it has been overtaken by the slow steady march of a consumerist rant about cavity wall insulation, my experiences when a certain company came to do mine, and my exhortation to my readers not to use that company. O tempora.

Educational policy

As a first year tutor with the Open University,  I am used to students arriving with a whole range of abilities and learnings.  What strikes me more forcefully as time goes by is that there are enormous variations in their ability to think for themselves and to take charge of their learning. I am driven more and more to the conclusion that where they have learned to think, it is in spite of rather than because of any education they have received.

Age is not a significant variable as far as I can see.  Like most generalisations that has lots of nuances, but the nub of it is that most new students, of whatever age, arrive expecting to be taught rather than expecting to learn. The result is that I spend a lot of my time trying to get them to engage with the module material and their own learning in an entirely new way. Some take to it fine, some resist – sometimes quite strongly. I have never had the experience that many of my colleagues apparently have of students assuming they have bought the marks they want, but it takes a lot sometimes to break down the expectation that they should be told what to think rather than how to think.

I don't blame the students for this. I remember my own trajectory through learning, primarily in the 60s and 70s, a golden age according to some, a mess of political correctness according to others. The school and the university I attended were among the “finest”, but it was only in my third year at university that I began to get a glimmer of how I could actually learn rather than just absorbing what I was told to absorb. I spent another couple of decades gradually understanding more and more that I could think for myself.

My students are smart, almost without exception. Even those whose modes of expression are, well, basic. The smartness has not been channelled, and in many cases has actually been compromised by the system in which they have been taught. This remains true with those whose schooling is very recent. Constant improvements in grades does not seem to be matched by students' ability to make use of their innate gifts.

It may seem paradoxical, but I don't blame schools or teachers for this. I think we have a lot of good schools, and I think we have a lot of good teachers. What we have, however, is a failure of educational policy, and a failure that has been persistent, probably for three decades. The be all and end all of a school's life is the league tables. The easy and false assumption that has been made by every education minister since Kenneth Baker is that good grades mean good learning. But the problem with target driven systems is that if you set people targets, they will ignore everything else in their determination to reach the target. It's bad enough if the target is just a bonus, as it is in so many flawed employee performance schemes, but when the institution stands or falls by whether it meets its targets, as is now the case with schools, everything else will go to pot. The average teachers, the good teachers, and the best teachers all know it doesn't matter a stuff what their pupils learn as long as they pass the exam. The result is pupils who are well versed in how to pass an exam without having having learned all they could of the unexaminable skills that good schools could give them. One student of mine last year, straight from A-levels, said that he didn't learn anything in his last three months at school - he and his classmates were getting nothing other than coaching in how to pass the exam. So much gets lost to the tyranny of measurement. And in fact I'm not sure that any recent education minister, Michael Gove being an egregious example, knows what education is for.

We need good citizens and good workers. That is, if there are any jobs left for them. Citizens need to be able to think. (A good citizen is a critical one, although the government thinks a good citizen is a compliant one.) Workers need, above all these days, to be able to think. The league table system seems designed to iron the thinking out of them, while ironing in the ability to pass exams, and to recite Cromwell's dates. Creativity, which used to be an optional extra, but is now a requirement of modern life, is stifled too often by inappropriate targets. It doesn't work. Not nearly as well as it should do. As I said, we have a lot of good schools and a lot of good teachers. They often succeed. But they do so in spite of educational policy, not because of it.

On history and geography

For me history and geography are twins. I mean human geography, which is the kind I am concerned with. Those who look for an oxbow lake whenever they hear the word “geography” will be disappointed by this post.

In changemooc we've been working on a variety of issues about the openness of education.   E.g. the whole idea of connectivism, which breaks disciplinary boundaries by organising according to student experience. In H812 we've been working on disciplinary differences. There's a big movement in education to define and privilege the differences between disciplines with the implication that this must have profound impacts on teaching methods. To an extent I can see that this is true. If you're teaching things to which there is an exact answer, such as a mathematical problem or a chemical formula, then you must teach exactness of method, and intolerance for inaccuracy, except where defined as permissible. If you're teaching sociology then you must teach the primacy of viewpoint and relativity as a method, or the whole thing goes to pot.  But many things also remain the same. Students still have to learn how to learn, how to study, how to approach answers, how to become independent. Perhaps the implications are bigger for teaching than they are for learning, but I do wonder how big they are. Maths - exactness, sociology - relativity. The difference is so obvious that it can be taken as obvious. I'm not convinced of the need to build a superstructure around it of disciplinary method which is wholly and exclusively owned by that discipline, and must, really, really must, be differentiated from what other disciplines do. Some suggest (e.g. Healey, M (2000) Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and learning in higher Education: a discipline-based approach, Higher Education Research and Development, Vol 19, 3, pp 169 – 189) that this is to do with academic training, that people are brought up within a discipline and get thoroughly and forcefully socialised in that discipline's ways, and also taught some kind of exclusivity, that this is how we do it, and it's completely different from the way everybody else does it. It's the idea that difference has to be exclusive that bothers me. I don't have a problem with methodical rigour, I do have a problem with exclusivity that prevents people from working across boundaries.
I never got this kind of exclusive training. I didn't get trained beyond undergraduate status, and in any case my first degree was in classics, which is multidisciplinary. Thirty years later I got a degree in social sciences which has always been my first love. Social science is pretty multidisciplinary too. I've done research, and had it published, on the basis of my jack-of-all-trades skills, and it has been reasonably well received, so I don't feel lost without the kind of disciplinary loyalties that some of my colleagues display.

It wouldn't bother me much what other people do except for the preciousness which they sometimes display in defending their disciplinary turf against some outside interference, and the petty level to which this can descend. It has, however, begun to bother me lately, because I love teaching both geography (of the human variety) and history. But it's very difficult to cross those (in my view, artificially exaggerated) disciplinary boundaries. In my view you can't teach one without the other. You can't do time without space or space without time. Yet, not only are they different disciplines, in the OU as in many universities, they are in completely different faculties. History is in humanities and geography is in social science. History is deemed to have more to with music, philosophy and art appreciation than with geography. Geography is deemed to have more to do with psychology and social policy than with history. Go figure.

This is a big problem for openness in education, to return to my changemooc theme, because openness in learning requires moving across disciplinary boundaries in response to the demands of the real, complex world. And that means having to leap across trenches which some of my colleagues are assiduously deepening and widening as we try to make connections. There has to be a better way to preserve the necessary skills for each discipline without digging those trenches.. I don't know what it is, but there has to be.

The TMA song

This deserves a very wide audience:

Elearning and digital (not)natives

I read an inspiring piece at Online College the other day: Emergence of the new learner.   It suggested that the characteristics of the new learner are that they create and broadcast content, they are connected and networked, that they are used to critique and need feedback. Furthermore the new learning environment is peer-to-peer collaborative and process-oriented. This is great stuff and it describes in  nutshell some of the key features of 21st century learning.

Inspiring as I say. Or it would be if I'd ever met a learner like that. OK, I exaggerate a tiny, tiny bit. I've tutored several hundred students in the last ten years, and I've lost count of the thousands who've been in forums I have moderated. I reckon I could count the new learners, as described above, on the fingers of both hands. I have no criticism personally of any of the students I have taught or moderated over the years: it's the way they've been taught.  As the Online College article goes on to say: “We are brought up, educationally speaking, sitting in neat rows and columns of chairs, listening to instructor-driven lectures, and completing multiple-choice exams at pre-determined intervals.” So people do what they have always done. And it's comfortable to do that. This is connected with my previous post about deep and surface learning. Surface learning is alienated learning, in my opinion – it is personally distant, irrelevant, useful only for jumping through hoops and is often jettisoned as soon as the hoop has been jumped. It's boring and the student can often be resentful and less than fully engaged in a task that is necessary because one is in school, but otherwise meaningless. On the other hand, the student is given little opportunity to explore ways in which the tasks might become meaningful, and no incentive either – surface learning is monotonous and featureless, but on the other hand it makes no personal demands. Real learning can shake your soul, and that is a step too far for many people.

Paradoxically, I don't think I can blame their teachers either. Primary and secondary teaching in the UK has improved greatly since I was at school decades ago. My children were much better taught than I was, which suggests that the teachers and the methods are better. But I don't think many teachers get a chance to teach as they are capable of teaching because they like everybody else in the primary and secondary education system, are focused on grades and league tables. It doesn't matter how good or bad a teacher you are, your one and only job is to get good grades, and as many as possible. So they teach for the exam, which is not necessarily the same as teaching for the learning. And that rubs off on the children who get the message that learning is a) not under their control b) not interesting in its own right and c) aimed at getting grades rather than having any intrinsic value. Perhaps I exaggerate. I'm sure I'll upset many a secondary school teacher if they read this. I don't intend to; I think they are genuinely trying to do a good job, but in a situation that militates against children ever being able to take control of their own learning – a key prerequisite for deep learning, and for thinking.

Also, learning happens in the context of a person's whole world. It's not just the teachers that are responsible, but the whole of society. Teachers don't stand a chance if the child they've been teaching goes home and hears what the teacher is doing rubbished by their family, their friends and their media. Our society teaches us how to do things and what things to do – and by “our society” I mean us, not some mythical thing for which nobody can take any responsibility. Driving is a good example. We get taught the mechanics,and a bit about manners, then we go off and drive the way everybody else does, which causes both chaos and carnage on the roads. More on that here and here. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of how we learn to drive, just to use it as an example of how powerful the learning is that we do from those around us.

I teach level 1 modules for the Open University. Most of my students have done no formal learning since school, regardless of what age they are. We get more and more young-ish people coming to us. Out of 25 current students 7 are under 25. That is they left school less than ten years ago. They, like everyone else, still need to learn how to learn. That is the first and most important aspect of my teaching relationship with them. Linked to that is the fact that they do not know how to learn online, and in fact are completely unfamiliar with the online environment as a place of learning. So I need to address both of these issues – learning how to learn, and learning how to learn online.

Learning how to learn is relatively easy to deal with. Every student arrives with their own motivation. There are some who will listen to me and some who will not. I don't mind that, as long as they get what they want. I can enthuse and inspire those who will listen and are open to being inspired. And I can start to teach them the benefits of critical thinking – the ability to look for the bigger picture, the habit of always asking why, the habit of never taking the taken-for-granted for granted, the habit of questioning everything, habits of honesty and objectivity, openness to new ideas, learning to base judgement on evidence. Interesting, isn't it, how many of these characteristics are personal rather than intellectual ones. It's hard work, it's a tough job, but it's relatively easy to conceptualise.

The elearning thing is a bit trickier though. Generally speaking students are not taking to elearning like ducks to water. They do what they have to, and they otherwise tend to ignore it. This is treated by some as a bit of a puzzle, particularly if you subscribe to the digital natives theory, which says that new generations of learners grow up with the online world. They're used to it, so they should naturally be able to learn in it. Doesn't seem to be the case with my students. Doesn't seem to be the case with other students either – there is an interesting survey from Canada – If Students Are Digital Natives, Why Don’t They Like E-Learning? – the conclusions of which are summed up by the title. And in fact the idea doesn't hold water, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, assuming that they know how to learn online assumes that they know how to learn. This doesn't seem to be the case. That is to say, they use a method of learning (everybody does) – usually the surface method, unless they have a reason for getting involved in something when they may well switch to the deep method. But using the deep method involves developing the skills and practices mentioned earlier on, and if people haven't developed those skills through repeated practice, then they won't be as good at it as they could be. That will be less satisfying for them, and it may be that they will drop back to the old, less effective but less demanding ways of learning. Unless they're consistently and enthusiastically taught to learn in this way. (I'll return to that.)

Secondly the assumption is made that if people are comfortable “being” online,  they will be comfortable “learning” online.  It ain't necessarily so. Being online for many people is about chatting and pursuing leisure interests. It is specifically not a place to engage the brain. Engaging the brain involves an entirely different set of habits and attitudes, and it takes an effort of will to move from one to the other – until you get used to it, and then the students will switch from Facebook friends to Facebook tutor groups with the same facility with which I do it. But the point is that they have to learn how to do it, and if they are not given the room and motivation to do it, they won't.

And there I think we academics in higher education, with some notable exceptions, are failing our students. There is not enough alignment in our teaching practices, and not enough acknowledgement of the basic skills that need to be learned by most university entrants. Alignment in teaching practice has been a problem for a long time, and remains a problem. Back in the 70s it appeared that lecturers looked for critical thinking, but taught and assessed conformity in ideas and the acquisition of detailed factual knowledge. (Entwistle, N. (2005) 'Introduction'. In: Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N., (eds.) The Experience of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education. 3rd (Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. p6.

And now I teach two courses where the importance of working online and collaboratively is acknowledged, and the tutors are required to offer online tutorials, but all the marks are given for traditional written assignments. If you think it's important, you should mark it.

Secondly, we don't acknowledge the need for the majority of our students, of whatever age or background, for a proper introduction to what learning online really means – the ability and the need to both control and juggle the sources and the motivations of our learning. When to put effort into working collaboratively so as to get the benefit out of it and when and how to put the effort into and learning critically so as to be able to take full control of their own lives.

The only question that remains is – is it really that important? If students can still learn satisfactorily in the traditional ways, why not let them do it? Because, rather like all those schools that are only “satisfactory”, it's not good enough. Surface learning is an old skill, suited to a world in which you could be a good worker and a good citizen without ever thinking too much. Deep learning has become a necessity for surviving in this world, both as a worker and as a human being. Students can get by making use of their education in a second rate way just as they always have done. And in some ways governments would rather they did – they don't want questioning, persistent, well-informed citizens, they want compliant ones. But for us as individuals, we have two choices, we can stagnate, or we can take control of both the style and the environment in which we learn. That means getting on top of the manifold ways in which data and information are spread across the internet, and learning how to evaluate, manipulate and deploy them. Doing any less means second tier jobs for second tier citizens. So, yes, it is important – important enough for us to insist that our students get the best they can out of both learning and elearning.

Deep and surface learning

We've been considering issues about deep and surface learning on H812. Good course, H812, but deceptively quick. It's very part time,  takes two years, one assignment every three months or so – it's a doddle, I thought. But the weeks fly past with a new topic each week; blink and you miss one, and at my age I blink a lot. Deep and surface learning attracted a lot of chat, and at least one misconception.

There's a very good summary of deep and surface learning at the HEA: Deep and Surface Approaches to Learning.   It gets the distinction right between deep learning being critical and surface learning not. The misconception I referred to above was that some people thought that wide learning entailed surface learning, e.g. For a law student who needs to learn by heart a number of not very well connected cases, it would perforce be surface learning. I don't see it that way at all, and I don't think inventors of the distinction thought so either. Even if you're skating the surface, you can learn deeply. It's not about what you're learning so much as the way you do it. To take the law student example above, learning case law is a gritty but necessary undertaking. Broadly speaking, you can either learn a series of unconnected names, dates,  principles and applications, or you can learn each case as a contribution towards a (probably fuzzy) understanding of an area of law that may connect eventually to other areas, where you can see the principles operating in similar ways, although in completely different spheres. The first student may well turn into a competent lawyer. The second is likely to turn out to be better,because they understand better the way the law works.

It's interesting that the HEA page concentrates on the meaning of deep learning rather than surface learning. It has a list of the characteristics of surface learning, but, other than that, doesn't go into much detail about it. I would have thought that the primary concern for teachers was how to turn surface learning into deep learning wherever possible. For that we need to understand what surface learning is – what motivates it and embeds it into a student's practice.

For me the key characteristic seems to be that it is a disengaged form of learning, learning that does not involve the student, that is kept at a distance from the student's being. It enters their mind, in a special compartment, marked “Nothing to do with me”, and sits there until the student has been examined on it or leaves school, whereupon it instantly self destructs. But it never enters their soul.

In my view, far too many people learn to learn in a surface way. I'll sketch the reasons why this is in another post, but for now I'll just take it as a given – to go into the reasons in detail would take far too long. Regardless of what the reasons are, that fact is a big influence in determining how we need to teach. One of the big debates of course will be whose responsibility it is – there will be those who say that if a student is learning in a disengaged way, it's only their own fault – they should take responsibility for themselves. And there is a tendency then to say that they should dig themselves out of their own hole. I don't think that follows. To me it doesn't make any difference whose fault it is; we still have to teach in a way that will re-engage them if it is possible.

There are two elements. One is attitude, one is skill. To learn at a deep level, you need an attitude of engagement, and you need the skills to learn. Your attitude can be influenced by your teacher, and the skills can certainly be learned under your teacher's tutelage. So that's our job as teachers sorted.

Identity, place and Eastbourne

More pics from Eastbourne, this time of interest to DD101 students, on the creation of identity and difference. In this case what we're looking at is the manufacturing of identity, and of difference, through the artificial creation of individuality. I came upon this gated housing estate being built while I was out for a walk.

First, they picture the beach and the sea at Eastbourne. This estate is miles from the sea. The word "Heights" in the name is a bit of a giveaway.

This manufactured community is intended for the over 45s only. No audible children or music etc. (Click on the image to expand it, and you will see the legend on the side of the van.)

This is where it gets really artificial. The estate is still being built while some people are already living there. The bungalows are being built and sold with their own "individuality" already established. This one is sold with its Chinese themed decoration ready installed. The next one, difficult to see here, has, with calculated incongruity, a Beatrix Potter theme. And so on down the street.

I don't know how long this shed has been in place, but not long enough to grow all the creeper. That was installed along with the shed.

Part of this is about the manufacture of community by putting up buildings, putting a (admittedly porous) fence around them and artificially delineating who should live in them. All of those are grist to the mill of the social science student. But in this case there's a specific application to the first few chapters of DD101, where the theme is difference and inequality. In this case the developers, as well as manufacturing community, are manufacturing difference - or to put it another way, manufacturing individuality. Treat it as a street, like the streets you've been examining so far in DD101. But note that this time any differences or individualities you see in the exterior of the bungalows has been put there deliberately and randomly by the developers.

The seaside

Just some shots I took at Eastbourne the other day.

They make a different class of beach hut there (running water and gas supplied).

They have their own tea chalet round the back. The Union Jack provides an extra touch of something.

And a Dotto train.

There's a very nice pier, and some winches. These are not like the winches at Hastings, which will be illustrated later.

Judging from the rust on the wire, these winches don't get used much.

This is an exercise in the creation of a seaside place and experience. The tea chalet, the train, the pier, and the winches all recall the nineteenth century creation of the seaside atmosphere. It's soggy with nostalgia, to quote Tom Lehrer. For AA100 students there's a lot here than resonates with the material in Book Four.